Review: A Cabinet of Curiosities at the Joyce

Image

Katherine W. Hunter and Lehua Estrada of the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company performing in “Gallery” as part of the Alwin Nikolais Celebration at the Joyce Theater.CreditCreditAndrea Mohin/The New York Times

The choreographer Alwin Nikolais came to modern dance late after studying piano and working in scenic design, puppetry and acting. Looking back now, it makes sense. Nikolais, who died in 1993, was ahead of his time in his vision of theater as a place where sound, light and movement work in concert to give birth to jewel-like spectacles. He was long accused of dehumanizing dance; yes, there can be shapes instead of bodies and masks instead of faces, but there’s no denying the heart in his choreography, however peculiar, playful or grisly it is.

Image

Members of Ririe-Woodbury Dance performing in Alwin Nikolais’s “Crucible.”CreditAndrea Mohin/The New York Times

On Tuesday at the Joyce Theater, the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, the repository of Nikolais’s work that is based in Salt Lake City, performed four dances spanning 30 years. The program was organized by Alberto del Saz, director of the Nikolais/Louis Foundation for Dance and a former member of Nikolais’s company. (Previously, he directed the foundation with Murray Louis, who died last week.) While all of the works are curiosities, they’re not equally timeless. But the performers, generous and game, bring the dances into the present. They also work as a group, and this all-for-one mentality seems crucial: Nikolais, who revered abstraction, stood for motion over emotion.

In the opening “Crucible” (1985), dancers appear disembodied, mischievously so, as their arms and legs extend above a mirror for a doubling effect that creates otherworldly spirals, which bend and fold into a continual morphing of new shapes. “Tensile Involvement” (1953), still a delight, is a feat of design in which dancers, using elastic bands, sprint onto the stage and create a web of angles and, just as quickly, dash off.

“Mechanical Organ” (1980) and “Gallery” (1978), both multisection works, show two sides of Nikolais. In the first, the more lighthearted “Mechanical Organ,” the dancers latch onto one another to form conjoined shapes. It meanders predictably; Melissa Rochelle Younker, in “Doll With a Broken Head” is exactly that as she dips and wobbles, gaining control over gravity and then losing it. But the grim “Gallery,” which takes place in a shooting gallery, has a more sinister air in which colorful targets pop up and are replaced by dancers in green masks. In the end, the shots hit, and both the targets and the faces are chewed apart. In between is an adventure of disembodied heads, floating pinwheels and dancing clowns — the scary sort. It’s a trip, and no drugs are necessary.